The Exemplary 2023:
The Linda Calsing Award

Fatima Al Fihri was the founder of the very first university in the world. She was born around the year 800 AD in Tunisia and migrated with her family to Fez, Morocco. Fatima (and her sister, Miriam) inherited the fortune her father had made as a merchant; she had no brothers. She was well educated for a woman of the time. She established a mosque for refugees and eventually began a learning center at the mosque. Eventually this evolved into a university for scholarly study; it is still in existence today. This university predated those in Europe, and indeed, European scholars came to Fez to study with the learned faculty.

My portrait of her was derived from a small line drawing I found online. She holds a book to suggest her learned status, and it is green, the sacred color of Islam. Behind her are the mosque and minarets of the city of Fez, and surrounding her are mosaics, the primary art form in the Islamic world. These mosaics are, appropriately, worked in mosaic stitch.

I was inspired to do a portrait of this woman, as her whole history is so unusual for any woman of that era and especially a Moslem woman.